The Chelsea Logistics, subsidiary of the Udenna Corp. of homegrown tycoon Dennis A. Uy, has proposed to develop the Davao International Airport to solve the increasing traffic of passengers and cargoes as a result of the city’s progress.“We started with the forecast – historical passenger growth, economic growth for the next 30 years, and derived with the forecast,” Engr. Manuel Jamonir, business development manager at the Udenna Infrastructure, told reporters.
Based on the forecast, the Davao International Airport will cater to about 15 million passengers in 2030, or nearly four times the four million at present.
The airport recorded a 10% increase in passenger volume and 30% cargo volume increase from 2017 to 2018.
“Because of low-cost carriers, there was a great increase of passenger influx. Also, Davao is a metropolitan city and a MICE (meeting, incentives, conference and exposition) hub so, the increase of passenger is expected,” Jamonir explained.
“We also need to expand existing cargo terminals because we observe (that) from August to November every year, our terminals are in heavy traffic with fruits and fishery products,” he added.
Jamonir also explained that their feasibility study and technical analysis on the capacity of the airport revealed that the present airport can still cater to the projected passenger traffic in the next 30 years, so there is no need to relocate the facility.
Jamonir reported that the development proposal is under the private-public partnership scheme with about P48.8 billion in nominal cost for 30 years that will be divided into three phases.
The first phase, Jamonir said, is expected to start next year with a P26 billion budget. “The Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines submitted the proposal to the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) for evaluation,” Jamonir reported.
“We are waiting for the results of NEDA evaluation at the end of this month,” he added.
According to Jamonir, the project is an unsolicited PPP proposal so it has to follow a process under the Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) Law.
“We submitted a proposal last year and received an original proponent status. We have to enter a Swiss challenge or a bidding (process) for unsolicited proposals,” he explained.
